With ‘Deli Boys,’ Jenni Konner Is Hoping to Strike a Chord

[This story contains major spoilers from the season one finale of Deli Boys.]

Jenni Konner has been making distinctive TV shows with humor and an inclusive bend for her entire career. The Girls co-showrunner and executive producer, who launched her own production studio in 2018 and now works alongside producing partner Nora Silver, is responsible for some of TV’s more colorful and newfangled takes over the last few years. That includes Single Drunk Female, Generation, Welcome to Chippendales and now, season two of Nobody Wants This. 

Her latest series, Hulu and Onyx Collective’s Deli Boys, is no different. Created by awarding-winning cannabis journalist and former Vice host Abdullah Saeed, the series follows Raj (Saagar Shaikh) and Mir (Asif Ali), two privileged and totally opposite brothers of Pakistani descent who are unexpectedly thrust into running their family’s deli empire — unbeknownst to them, a criminal front — with their Auntie Lucky (Poorna Jagannathan) following their father’s sudden death. 

It comes from the kind of perspective that Konner notes is rarely seen on TV. “The show is through an immigrant lens without it being about the immigrant experience,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We like to think of it as the next step in immigrant storytelling, which sounds kind of funny in this particular show, but I do think it is showing a different version of the immigrant experience.”

Konner, who spoke to THR while on her way to set for season two of Nobody Wants This, discusses the journey to getting Deli Boys to the screen, launching the comedy in the current industry and cultural climate, and how the kind of fresh, daring and inclusive shows she’s known for producing can hopefully find a home. 

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It was a five-year journey to get Deli Boys made. What compelled you to get attached to this? 

I actually just found an email yesterday that Nora [Silver], my producing partner, wrote that said, “We met with this amazing writer named Abdullah Saeed, he has a really good show and we should tell Fox 21 [Television Studios]” — which was our original studio — “about him.” So it was five years ago, and it was sent to us because he just wrote it as a sample. He has said that he couldn’t get hired and was like, “I’m going to write a script as a sample that no one will ever make.” Then he wrote it, we read it when everyone else read it, and we were like, “We want to make it.” So we walked it into Fox 21. It was right at the beginning of our new deal with Disney, and they bought it. And by walking in, I mean we Zoomed in with them because it was the very beginning of COVID.

You were involved in selecting the cast. Can you talk about figuring out your leads?

To get most shows made now, they want a celebrity. They want someone famous. You have such a small amount of time to build an audience. It’s so hard to get people who haven’t been in anything on talk shows and interviewed. But because of how far behind the world our business is, there were no famous young South Asian actors that were in any way realistic for this. Riz Ahmed wasn’t going to make this show. So we got lucky because we got to make discoveries, which is something we did on Girls and doesn’t happen very much anymore. The first thing that happens when you walk into a pitch is someone says, “Who are you going to cast?” But there weren’t that many celebrities who were right and available, so we got to dig deep. 

We had a very good casting person, Seth Yanklewitz, who turned over rocks. He went out into the world and found people. When we were casting, he would ask an actor about their grandfather for a small part. And for Disney casting, Stephanie Levinson [evp of casting at 20th] is amazing and creative. So we had a lot of support, and we got to look and find two people and make sure they had chemistry. Now they’re like best friends and brothers. They really, really love each other.

The other thing we got so lucky about was Poorna [Jagannathan] and Brian [George]. She’s an actor who has played a mom a lot. She played a best friend a lot. So it was different to have her be an incredible mob badass. Same with Brian, who played the Pakistani guy in Seinfeld. They are both fantastic actors.

This show is coming out in a politically conservative moment, also with the DEI rollbacks. This is different than the last couple of years when your other shows like Single Drunk Female, Welcome to Chippendales and Generation were released. There’s a general feeling that the industry is somewhat giving up on fresh, fun, inclusive storytelling. Onyx Collective was attached to this, and that is an effort specifically designed to platform these kinds of stories, but do you feel like interest is waning? 

We made this show in a very different climate, as you know. But I would say, internally, it is not waning. The support has been insane. If you drive around Los Angeles, there are tons of ads for it. There’s a Yeastie Boys truck on Melrose Place today. There’s been incredible, incredible support, it’s been miraculous. I don’t remember in my life since Girls an ad campaign and marketing campaign with people working so hard. The marketing and PR teams and awards teams at Onyx and 20th are incredible. So we’ve been really, really supported. I don’t know what that’s going to look like coming out into the world. The base of this show is really a sweet family story and I hope it’s some representation of humanity that touches people and shows another point of view. It’s so ugly out there that all we can do is hope.

Shows that cast or write for certain characters through a different lens can get boxed into being the “diverse” show. But at their core, they’re what you said: “a representation of humanity,” a familiar narrative told with a new spin. How does Deli Boys do that for you? 

Abdullah said something I loved when I first met him. He said, “It’s time for Brown people to be able to be bad guys and not bad guys who are terrorists.” The show is through an immigrant lens without it being about the immigrant experience. It’s a hard family crime comedy, broad, silly and ridiculous, but through the lens of first and second generation [immigrants]. We like to think of it as the next step in immigrant storytelling, which sounds kind of funny in this particular show, but I do think it’s showing a different version of the immigrant experience. 

You’ve attached yourself to some distinct shows in the comedy/rom-com/YA space, and you’re also co-showrunning Nobody Wants This season two, which is an inclusive rom-com through the lens of religious diversity. Your shows have had different homes, between linear and streamers. Where do you feel stories do well right now? What does the landscape look like for selling this kind of stuff?

It’s confusing, and it seems to be in flux. Michelle Nader, who ran this show, is the showrunner of Shifting Gears, which is the number one show right now on broadcast. I just want to keep making surprising shows and hope there’s a world for them. I have never been a person who’s looked to figure out what someone was looking for and fill it because I would do it if I thought I could. We’re currently working on a show — my mother was disabled — and that’s my next frontier, but certainly that’s not anything someone’s looking for right now in terms of what the show is.

But it’s something that seems really interesting to me. Let’s see what happens and hope there’s someone in the world who goes, “I’m not trying to tell you a lesson or do something good for the world.” They’re just like, “I love this story of these two women, and they happen to have a disability.” I’m just going to keep making weird shows and hope people respond. To be fair, critics responded to Single Drunk Female, but again, no one was looking for a show about alcoholism. I’m just walking around trying to make shows and hope that I strike a chord.

This is the first noisy show I’ve been on since Girls. It doesn’t necessarily translate to people watching it, but people are talking about it and that means a lot to me. It’s hard to get eyeballs on things that are this weird and original without stars. The world has changed so much since we made this show. I hope if one okay thing comes out of it, it’s that people want this content more when our world feels so dangerous. I hope there’s a billion people who feel so underrepresented that this will put some asses in the seats for something that is a very human story.

It’s hard not to look at Deli Boys and showrunner Abdullah Saeed through the lens of the last few years in Hollywood where new voices who are doing something different get a shot. Quinta Brunson feels like one example of that. What can writers, producers or anyone in the industry do to help keep open a window that is possibly closing because of contraction or a shifting approach to greenlighting projects?

One of the things that I think is really not happening is that some of these voices are emerging, and people are excited about the project, but because of money, they don’t always set everyone up for success. People have a really hard time, young writers. A showrunner, in my opinion, is like a four-person job, which is why I have so many people working with me at all times, including my producing partner, Nora, who does everything in production. I do writing, and we all deal with casting, and I’m in editing a ton. 

But people aren’t set up for success, so a lot of these unique voices fail through no fault of their own. The voices you’re talking about will have a billion percent bigger chance to succeed if someone puts them with a showrunner and puts them with someone who’s shepherding them through and protecting their voice. It’s what I did with Lena. And when you develop things from day one, it’s already happening. But sometimes these people see these unique scripts and everyone’s excited about it, and then they just throw them into the deep end, and it all goes away. 

The first season of Deli Boys is out. Have you thought about season two? Planned anything out?

What’s always fun in any writers room is that in season one, you pitch things that are so great and you’re like, “that will be great in a season two.” It’s too early. We don’t have some huge mega-plan, but we do have this storage of really fun, weird ideas that may or may not emerge. We left it on a huge cliffhanger. We could end anyway we feel like. It’s like, who did this thing? Who blew up the deli? We have all of these ways to go. It will be fun to figure out what to do with these boys.

We also know in so many fun, new ways what these actors are good at, and what is a super funny energy for them. Those guys are really funny together. Or the Maaliks, we intended to kill them all off, and we just fell in love with them. So it’s always fun to figure out what’s great [on-screen]. In Girls, we were like, “Ray (Alex Karpovsky) and Shoshana (Zosia Mamet) are so funny together. Let’s keep that going.” It was one scene that we were like, they have such funny energy together, and we wrote to it. That’s one of my favorite things about writing and having the good fortune of having a show that keeps running.

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Season one of Deli Boys is now streaming on Hulu.